Joseph McElroy

Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

A long-ago kidnaping case all but abandoned resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighborhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man’s obsession revisits people as clues while at the center, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife’s voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them. All these unfolding circles of understanding in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, even a solvent at times simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half century later, we may experience in Hind’s Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnaped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.

An uninvited guest, entering the empty New York apartment of a man known to intimates as Dom, proceeds to write for his absent host a curious confession. Its close accounts of friendship since boyhood with two men surely unknown to Dom and certainly to each other is interleaved with the story of Dom himself. Ancient History is one of the only novels by Joseph McElroy to not have been re-issued in paperback, coming out alongside his new novel after a year-long re-introduction of his work to readers via eBooks.

"Move over, Pynchon--the 83-year-old Joseph McElroy is as inventive as ever, and this time he takes on the Iraq War." --Tom LeClair, The Daily Beast "Since 1966, McElroy's novels have astonished and delighted by their brilliant wit, intelligence, and style."--Washington Post Book World"McElroy is rightly compared with Gaddis and Pynchon."--Harper's MagazineWritten in a voice of passion, warning, and awakening, Joseph McElroy's ninth novel, Cannonball, takes us to a distant war we never understood and have half forgotten upheld by an unearthed new testament and framed by the American competitive psyche; yet always back to a California family, a bold intimacy between brother and sister, and a story of two springboard divers and their different fates. Joseph McElroy is the recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill foundations, as well as the NEA. He lives in New York City.